Content Warning: Miscarriage
In 2014, I was alone in a hotel in Omaha, Nebraska, which sounds like where the body in a pulp detective novel is found, or how an indie flick about a struggling band starts, or where a business lady strips off her pantyhose after a long day at some mind-numbing conference; but in my limited experience, it’s not the best place to find out you’re pregnant. It was my fault for taking the test when I did; I was a fifteen hour drive away from home and had only one hour before I had to be telling jokes on stage at a comedy club in Omaha. The only reason I took the pregnancy test was because I was so certain it would be negative. I definitely wasn’t meaning to be pregnant, and besides, I’d only seen my husband three days in the last month, so what were the odds?
I took it because I was late and I’d never been late before. Also, I understand how babies are made and during those three days we’d not not been trying to make one. The month before I’d visited my best friend, Erin, and she and I had fallen in love with the idea of us having babies at the same time; the same way we’d fallen in love with becoming doctors together and getting tattoos of mountains on our arms together (both things she’d followed through on after I’d moved on to the next fun possibility). My husband, Ben, and I had been talking about the possibility of maybe having a baby “some day in the future” since we’d met in 2003. Recently the talk had become a bit more concrete but as we’d told our friend Steve, as he wrangled his rowdy two year old and joked, “this might give you second thoughts about having kids,” you don’t get to our age and not have kids by choice if you don’t constantly have second thoughts.
When the first test came back positive, I wouldn’t believe it. I called Ben on FaceTime and he waited patiently while I cried and then he encouraged me to take the second test.
“I just don’t want it to be true.” I said through choked sobs.
In the moment when the vague notion of having a baby became a real possibility, I was finally sure about what I wanted. When the second one came back negative the relief was overwhelming. I almost skipped to the CVS to buy two more tests just to be sure, already thinking about the joke I’d write about having my first pregnancy scare in my 30’s. About how the 16 year old at the counter had scanned the test and whispered “You probably want a bag for this, right?” and I’d whispered back, “no, why?” and she’d said “Oh! Well, like, some people are embarrassed!” and I’d laughed and told her “well, like, maybe if I was a teenager.” And how she’d laughed and then became serious and said “Yeah, I don’t get why it’s so popular these days. I mean, like, how can you have a child if, like, you are a child, right?”
The next two tests quickly showed positive, as did the two after that. I texted my best friend, the doctor, and she texted back (I imagine with the same arm where her sweet mountain is inked) that five positive pregnancy tests means you are pregnant. Not probably; definitely. I cried and then apologized to my husband for not reacting better. He assured me that everything was going to be okay, that he was scared but excited, that it was okay if I wasn’t excited. I cried while I got ready for my shows, stopped crying while I walked through the lobby, cried again on the four minute drive to the club and finally stopped when I got to the greenroom.
“How was your day?” asked the headliner, a great comedian from Denver who I’d met the day before. And though I knew this was something too heavy to lay on a relative stranger, I couldn’t stop myself from telling him. His reaction was so completely gracious and kind and funny and understanding that I instantly wished his name wasn’t also Ben so that I could name the person growing inside of me after him.
“I…just…it’s just…crazy.” I repeated some variance of this nonsense until I had to get on stage. I don’t remember anything about being on stage that night other than looking down at one point and seeing the mic shaking in my hand. After the show as I talked to audience members I found myself barely able to suppress telling them I was pregnant because it was the only thought I could hold in my head.
“Great show!”
“Thanks!” I’m pregnant.
“Are you really from West Virginia?”
“I wouldn’t make that up!” I’m pregnant.
“How much for the t-shirts?”
I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant.
The truth was, I wasn’t scared of a baby. I liked kids; I’m good with kids. Ben had always wanted children. He is the kind of man who inspired women to pull me aside and whisper, “he’s going to be an amazing dad.” He’s the kind of husband that you want to build a family with. The truth was that I was scared of what having a baby was going to mean for my identity and for my career; which at that point, were one in the same. And though Ben had always maintained that we’d “find a way to make it work,”I knew a baby would mean a big disruption and not just in the way a baby disrupts any new parent’s life. The year before I’d spent some part of 45 weeks away from home, doing stand-up in comedy clubs, colleges, and dive bars across the country. Four years before that, I’d given up the stability of a promising career as a lawyer to pursue comedy full-time. I’d worked hard to get where I was, which, in stand-up terms, was pretty much nowhere. Ben and I moved to West Virginia when he got a job as a professor at West Virginia University, a job that he loved and thrived at and a job that afforded me the opportunity to travel and do stand-up full-time for little money. But there was no stand-up comedy in West Virginia and a baby would mean no more traveling, and therefore no more performing for who knew how long (six months? a year? forever?). At the time, to me, having a baby in West Virginia meant quitting stand-up, and I couldn’t quit.
Between Friday, when I took the tests, and Monday when I drove fifteen hours home to West Virginia, I incrementally shifted from “this isn’t happening” to “this may be happening despite my fervent wish it wasn’t” to “holy shit this is definitely happening.” On Tuesday, I still cried every time I thought about the future, but I started to focus on the concrete steps I needed to take. I bought prenatal vitamins and I downloaded an app that told me what piece of food the fetus resembled every day. I joined pregnancy message boards and then un-joined them. On Wednesday, I told my parents. I’ve never heard my dad so happy. It was reassuring to talk to people who were only excited for us, who didn’t share all the complicated feelings that we were wrestling with. I told Ben that night that I was starting to feel like we could do this, that we could have a baby. He held me and told me he knew everything would be great. On Thursday, I noticed a few drops of blood, which my best friend the doctor and the crazies on the internet assured me was common. On Friday, when the bleeding hadn’t stopped, Ben and I went to an OB/GYN who did an ultrasound and showed us the embryonic sac. It was like a scene from a movie, the doting husband holding the glowing wife’s hand while the doctor waves a wand over her belly and points out their baby on the screen. Except in real life, the doctor couldn’t tell us what was there and scheduled blood tests to find out if this was normal bleeding or if I was having an early miscarriage.
As I walked out, the doctor patted my hand kindly and told me that we’d know one way or the other by Monday. I nodded and wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to be so worried, that I’d be okay, that I didn’t really want to be pregnant anyway. But of course, as clichéd as it was, at that moment I realized that was no longer true.
The weekend was long and awful and painful and by Monday I had no doubt that I was no longer pregnant. The blood tests and another ultrasound confirmed it. I told my parents and the two friends who knew. I told the comedian I’d cried to in Omaha, who again, was gracious and kind and who I made promise he would be my friend for life (Look him up: Ben Roy. He is insanely talented).
Two days after that, I kissed my husband goodbye and drove to St. Louis for two weeks of shows. Like nothing had happened. Like everything was back to normal.
Except it had and I wasn’t.
So much has changed in the 10 years since that weekend in Omaha— we moved to New York, had a baby, moved to Atlanta, I watched all four seasons of Hart of Dixie, I published a book (you didn’t think I could go that long without mentioning it, did you?). But in the immediate aftermath, something shifted in me that I could never quite pinpoint, and even though miscarriage is such a common thing, I talked about it with almost no one. I didn’t want to seem damaged or weak for being emotional about something so relatively minor or make anyone else uncomfortable. But I wish that I had reached out, because it might have helped work through the complicated feelings- sadness and relief and then guilt for the relief and then right back to sadness over the loss again. At the very least I would have felt less alone in my grief.
In 2019, I had another miscarriage. It was devastating, but this time I told my community and posted about it on social media. The number of messages I got from friends and strangers telling me their own stories of miscarriage was staggering. But instead of feeling overwhelming, it was a relief to share my pain, to carry it for those who were unable, to shed light on something that should never have been in the dark to begin with.
Woof, it feels weird to do the promotion part now, doesn’t it? Here’s a picture of a mountain to cleanse our palates.
Thank you so much to everyone who has read, talked about, and reviewed Going to Maine! If you haven’t yet, the biggest thing you can do to help me get this book to a wider audience is to leave a review (something simple like “I liked this book” would be great).
Here are some places I’ll be talking about Going to Maine this fall:
October 4-6, 2024, Saratoga Book Festival, Saratoga Springs, NY
October 12, 2024, Mountain Day Festival, Buena Vista, VA
October 13, 2024, Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Gathering, Abingdon, VA
October 22, 2024, Author talk at Estacada Public Library, Estacada, OR
October 26, 2024, Author talk at REI Co-op, Kennesaw, GA
November 16, 2024, Books by the Banks, Cincinnati, Ohio
Here are three things I’m loving recently:
Slow Horses. The 4th season of this Apple TV show about misfit MI5 agents just started and it’s already sucked me back in.
Alone. This survival show has me critiquing people on how they are building a log cabin with their bare hands.
New comedy specials from Shanda Sung (Pickles) and Carmen Lagala (Sweet Batch). Two of my favorite comedians just put out new specials and they are both available on Youtube.
And if you haven’t already, you can order Going to Maine through most major booksellers, including Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and Apple Books.
One of the few times I read something on substack that is intensely genuine. I will be ordering the book tonight :)